Sudden blackouts are caused by events such as storms or accidents, and they can last an indeterminate length of time. Another term, “rolling blackout,” refers to a blackout that's implemented by the utility company the same way a brownout is but instead of it being a partial loss of power, it's a complete outage.

The fastest way to check power outages is by visiting CenterPoint's official outage tracker at: https://tracker.centerpointenergy.com/map/. This is their dedicated outage tracker website.

Utility workers can fix a minor incident, such as a fallen power line, in around 2-3 hours. But when the cause of a blackout is severe weather or a natural disaster, you can expect to be out for several days and even months in some extreme cases.